Completely Unnecessary Analysis: "Elf"

In Completely Unnecessary Analysis, I’ll find thematic and literary elements in books, movies, and other narratives that demand no analysis whatsoever. In the words of John Green, “nerd life is so much better than real life.”

The film that got me thinking about this was the 2003 film Elf, where Will Ferrell plays Buddy the Elf, a human raised since childhood at Santa’s North Pole believing he is an elf. After growing up, he heads to New York to meet his family, who are a bit shocked to see him, and not entirely in the Christmas spirit, so he has to save Christmas, etc.

I doubt anyone involved in the Christmas-movie-mass-production industry ever thought about this. But every time I see it, and my family watches it just about every year, I think about the literary caricature of the Noble Savage.

The Noble Savage emerged during the Enlightenment as a product of the writings of philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The two believed that people were inherently good, but that living in society turned them to unhappiness and corruption. The Noble Savage, then, is the character who has lived outside the bounds of society and retains his natural moral goodness, emotional well-being and physical vigor, often with a certain childlike naïvete. Prominent examples include Friday from Robinson Crusoe, the hobbits in Lord of the Rings and Disney characters like Tarzan and Pocahontas. The idea is also scientifically and anthropologically invalid, but that’s a different story.

Buddy the Elf, like the Noble Savage, has retained his superhuman abilities. He sleeps about 45 minutes a night and possesses superhuman decorating and snowball-making and -throwing abilities. He walked all the way to New York City from the North Pole. Near the beginning in the film, he communicated with both animals and snowmen, symbols of nature. Not to mention that he can consume physically impossible levels of sugar.

One scene near the beginning of the film contrasts him with his skeptical love interest, played by Zooey Deschanel, a disgruntled department store employee “just trying to get through the holidays.” Her water has shut off and she finds no joy in her job. The pressures of proletarian production, financial stresses, and living in a degenerating urban environment have eaten away at her cheery spirit. Only with the help of Buddy the Elf’s superhuman charm can she reach her “natural” level of happiness.

Sometimes archetypes like these become so entwined in literature we don’t even notice them. The Noble Savage has a great appeal: the idea that people would be good if only we got in touch with the beauty of nature more, the idea that we can solve everything in one fell swoop, one simple solution: removing society. Even though the circumstances that encouraged it are gone, the Noble Savage is in its second life through low-culture films.